not every woman who owns a pig—or wants to—but I’ve never considered myself an ordinary woman.
Geranium was, for a time, a preschool mascot at the private school at which I taught. When I announced my resignation, the staff and children voted that Geranium should come with me, a bit of tender pork by which to remember them. This was much to the relief of the administration, who had been wondering how to break it to the kids that Geri’s feed bill had been cut out of the budget.
Although my mother did become hysterical for a while upon learning her first grandchild was actually a potbelly pig, she’s come to appreciate Geranium. Pigs are very smart. Geranium is capable of similar reasoning and mischief making to that of a four-or five-year-old child. She needs me. Having been a kindergarten teacher, I’m able to stay one step ahead of her most of the time.
I wrestled her out of her little denim jean jacket with the industrial snaps on the arms. Geranium loves her jacket. She’s very vain and self-important for a pig.
Once she realized I wasn’t going to back down, she willingly let me unsnap the jacket, and trotted outside through the pet door that leads to her sandbox-size litter box and her bed. Geranium is small, which is fortunate for me. She weighs about sixty-five pounds and stands just over a foot tall and approximately two feet long. Pigs are very compact and have hard bodies, so Geri actually takes up very little space—not much more than a large footstool. She’s at least twenty pounds lighter than Hildy and has no tail to sweep everything off coffee tables. In truth, she’s a lot easier to handle than Hildy, who, when I enter the front door, sometimes jumps up and puts her paws on my shoulders to lick my face.
That was another thing about Hank that made me know we’d never work out as a couple. He thought pigs belonged in pigpens in the state of Iowa and nowhere else on the planet. He’s going to have a bad shock when he sees his first pig farm in Mississippi.
He also bought into all the clichés and fallacious stigmas about pigs, and wouldn’t be convinced that the term “dirty as a pig” is pure falsehood. Pigs are very clean animals if not forced to live in untended stys. In fact, even under those conditions, a pig will use only one corner of the pigpen as a toilet. It’s where they’re forced to live, not the pigs themselves, that is to blame for the phrase “stink like a pig.”
Pigs have no odor. I tried to make Hank smell Geranium once to find that out for himself, but he refused. Yet another chink in our relationship.
The other public relations problem pigs have is that they like to roll in the mud. They don’t like being warm and can actually get sunburned if they’re exposed too much. Therefore they roll in the mud to cool off and keep the sun off their skin. Does anyone criticize a woman for using sunblock? I think not.
The telephone rang just as Hildy and I were settling in for the night. It was Mandie, a young single mother whose parents had just hired me to be her doula. She was crying.
“Molly?”
“What is it, honey?”
“I’m so scared. I went to the doctor today, and he says that I could give birth any time now. I don’t want to give birth, Molly.” She hiccuped tearfully. “I want it to stop!”
It’s a little late for that now. Tactfully I didn’t point that out.
“Things are going to be fine,” I assured her. “You’re a healthy young woman. You have a wonderful doctor to care for you, and I’m here for you, too.”
“I’m not a woman, I’m just a kid!”
Truer words were never spoken. Babies having babies. I see far too much of it and it breaks my heart. But it’s not my place to judge. I’m called to be salt and light to these girls, Jesus embodied in me.
“How do you feel?” I asked. “Are you having pain?”
“No. I just keep thinking…”
“How about if I talk you through some deep-breathing exercises? It might be time to give your brain a rest.”
I stayed on the line until Mandie was calmer and ready to sleep.
Hildy snuffled wetly and shifted so that her legs were rigid, managing to take up two-thirds of the mattress. I could hear Geranium rooting around in her pen for nonexistent truffles and the tick of my grandparents’ old clock in the living room. All was right with the world.
The telephone rang at 8:00 a.m. I tried to ignore it and let my answering machine pick up, but then I remembered Mandie. She might be in labor.
“Hullo?” I snuffled into the phone, my voice scratchy from disuse.
“Wake up, sleepyhead! It’s play day!” Lissy sounded annoyingly chipper.
Saturdays are always play days for Lissy. She tries to pack an entire week’s worth of fun into eight or ten hours and always wants company doing it—me.
“I might have a baby coming today.”
“Then we should go soon so we can get a few hours in before you have to be at work.”
“I need to do laundry,” I reminded her. “I’ve had a busy week.”
“Nonsense. We’ll just buy you new clothes. If you can’t go two or three weeks without washing, you’re definitely short.”
“I thought we were going to a museum one day.”
“Fine, be cerebral and dull. How about the Science Museum? That’s my speed. They’ve got lots of dinosaurs.”
“Do we need to borrow a child to go there?”
“Nah. We’ll just pretend ours are already there, running around. That place is always stuffed with kids. You shop with me, I’ll go to the museum with you. Deal?”
Why fight it? Lissy is a lot like Geranium and Hildy. It rarely pays to argue with hardheaded females.
Chapter Three
Of course Lissy had her way and I didn’t. We went shopping.
Lissy pulled a navy-blue suit off the rack and waved it under my nose. “How about this? This would be great for church and it would subdue that red hair of yours.”
“Why on earth would I want to do that?” I held up a broomstick skirt in all the colors of the rainbow. “What do you think of this?”
“It’s a bad accident in the crayon factory. Too many colors.”
I held it up and looked at myself in the mirror. My red hair was fighting against the bond of the braid I’d woven, and so a wild cloud of rusty red framed my face. The bright teal shirt I wore accented the giddy colors in the skirt.
“If that skirt could talk, it would say—” Lissy covered her ears “—too loud, turn down the volume!”
That helped me to make up my mind. I handed it to a hovering clerk. “I’ll take it.”
“She’s a free spirit,” Lissy muttered
